Flashback: The U.S. Military Literally Proposed Creating a “Gay Bomb”

Yes, literally a gay bomb: our military proposed a plan to disrupt enemy forces by using a chemical weapon that would turn them all homosexual.

Via Gizmodo:

It proposed a bomb “that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another”. While the laboratory also came up with similarly questionable ideas, such as bad-breath bombs, flatulence bombs and bombs designed to attract swarms of stinging insects to enemy combatants, one has to admit that the gay bomb is certainly the most novel.

The Pentagon maintains that the love affair with the gay bomb idea was brief. However, the Sunshine Project thinks the Pentagon doth protest too much, finding that they “submitted the proposal to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider”. Indeed, the proposal’s information was submitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.

The Pentagon certainly admits giving the project consideration, releasing a statement affirming: “The department of defence is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform.”

Other possibilities they considered in the document included spraying enemies with chemicals that would make bees or animals attack them, and even creating a “low toxicity compound of [redacted] that still retains the characteristic of creating [redacted] (severe and lasting halitosis) for those exposed to small concentrations.”

The three-page U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory document dated June 1994 outlines the project “Harassing, Annoying and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” which can be read here. The document was retrieved via a FOIA request from the Sunshine Project.

But no worries. We’re told that, even though they went from project draft in 1994 to serious consideration and even NAS submission seven long years later in 2002, after that they decided to just drop it and supposedly none of these weapons were ever further developed or put into use…

Uh-huh.

Right.